Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  HEADLESS – This is an example of that rare beast, the horror 'spin-off'. Its inspiration, the acclaimed indie horror flick 'Found', was a kind of dark coming of age type yarn in which a kid finds out that his brother is a serial killer. We got to see bits of the kid raiding his bro's horror tape collection and zoning out to transgressive looking clips of basically some dude in a skull mask going around shagging severed heads. Well, 'Headless' is a film-within-a-film no more, and here is the full throttle feature length version of, to quote my last sentence, “basically some dude in a skull mask going around shagging severed heads”. 'Headless' could be thought of as being part of an underground tendency in latter day US horror, one typified by the work of people like Ryan Nicholson and Brian Paulin and by some of the films that get released by the likes of Unearthed – a no holds barred sub-genre with a fixation on taking revolting gore and depravity to the limit, or at least trying to. That said, 'Headless' didn't strike me as being the wall-to-wall celluloid abattoir I was expecting, although you couldn't say it doesn't deliver on the splatter front - along with the obligatory decaps, there's plenty of eyeball munching, gut ripping, male genitalia slicing etc etc, but it never feels totally excessive, which is probably for the best in a way because with these kind of films you can kind of get too much of a good thing if the 'spice' isn't there. So, is the 'spice' there in 'Headless'? Or better still, what is the 'spice'? For some, that might be the slight novelty of the necro stuff, the head fuc*ing which is 'Headless's selling point, sort of. Actually, that aspect is pretty subdued for the most part, although I can think of one scene that wouldn't get past the BBFC. I was more interested in the surrealist window dressing that the filmmakers threw in now and again to liven things up i.e scenes of killer dude writhing around with a mysterious faceless woman who often sits between two red candles. Also, hard-gore films are inevitably shot on digital and have a tendency to look skanky even these days, whereas 'Headless' sports a very realised aesthetic, one which is indebted to the whole 'grindhouse' thing that won't quite go away, but which is really well done – it's a film set in 1978 and supposedly made in 1978, and I have to say, in quite a few scenes and sequences they got the period look and feel just right, to the point of the film appearing indistinguishable from an old nasty. What else is there? An obligatory back story about horrendous childhood cruelty and, or course, a thin plot about – wait on, we've covered that base, I think. 'Headless' is a great film for unrepentant gore hounds who just want to see something messed up and mean spirited, preferably after having been force fed a 'Leprechaun' box set. |